Faith and Reason — Evidentialism, Fideism, and Reformed Epistemology

Evidentialism

Abstract

Evidentialism is "the initially plausible position that a belief is justified only if 'it is proportioned to the evidence'" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §2). In its strong, moralized form it holds that believing beyond the evidence is not merely unwise but wrong. Applied to religion, and conjoined with the claim that the evidence for God is at best inconclusive, it yields the conclusion that full theistic belief is unjustified—the epistemological engine behind the presumption of atheism. We treat it here as the challenge the two theistic views must answer.

Formal statement

Following the SEP's reconstruction (SEP Pragmatic Arguments §7):

1. (E) For all persons S, propositions p, and times t, S ought to believe p at t if and only if believing p fits S's evidence at t.
2. Religious belief held with full confidence "is justified only if there is conclusive evidence for it," and the arguments for God "are at best probable ones" (SEP Epistemology of Religion, preamble).
3. Therefore no one is justified in full belief that God exists.

The SEP labels (E) "Strong Evidentialism" and distinguishes it from a weaker (E′): if the evidence favors p, one ought to believe p—which says nothing about the evidentially silent case (SEP Pragmatic Arguments §7). Much of the debate is a contest between Strong and Weak Evidentialism.

Key evidence / textual basis

The canonical statement is Clifford's, quoted verbatim across our sources: belief upon insufficient evidence is "wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone" (SEP Faith §4). Crucially, Clifford's argument is itself a moral one: the harm is not merely holding a false belief but making oneself "credulous," eroding the social "habit of testing things and inquiring into them" (SEP Pragmatic Arguments §3). Hume supplies the temperate version—"a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence"—and the SEP notes that Enlightenment evidentialism stipulates that "no beliefs asserting the content of religious or mystical experiences count as evidence," which is what makes the religious case hard (SEP Epistemology of Religion §2). The contemporary heirs are Antony Flew's "presumption of atheism" and Michael Scriven, who rely on "the Ockhamist principle that, in the absence of evidence for the existence of things of kind X, belief in Xs is not reasonable" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §3).

Leading proponents

• W. K. Clifford — "The Ethics of Belief" (1877): evidentialism as an absolute moral requirement (corpus gap: essay reported via the SEP). The vivid foil for both James and the Reformed epistemologists.
• Antony Flew and Michael Scriven — the mid-20th-century presumption-of-atheism form; W. V. O. Quine and the broader naturalist tradition stand behind the Ockhamist fragment (SEP Epistemology of Religion §3).

Strongest counter-arguments

Two objections recur. First, self-referential incoherence: Plantinga charges that "evidentialism is self-referentially inconsistent for there is no evidence for evidentialism" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §3)—the principle fails its own test. Second, the ad hominem from disputed examples: Shalkowski argues that the examples used to motivate Ockham's Razor are ones where "either there is independent evidence for denying the existence of Xs or ones in which suspense of judgement seems appropriate, not denial," so the atheist evidentialist is "not an intellectual superior correcting mistakes, but a disputant" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §3). James adds the pragmatist's rejoinder that a rule "which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule" (SEP Pragmatic Arguments §3).

Responses

Evidentialism can retreat to a defensible fragment. The self-reference charge is met either by holding that "all that is being defended is the Ockhamist fragment," which "is not itself vulnerable to Ockham's Razor," or by arguing that "deriving an epistemology from a wide range of examples is evidence for it" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §3). And a probabilistic evidentialist need not demand certainty, only that credence track the balance of evidence. The Ockhamist fragment survives even where Clifford's absolutism does not.

Assessment

Assessment: Live — Clifford's strong, moralized principle is now widely regarded as self-undermining, but the Ockhamist and Weak-Evidentialist fragments remain the default epistemology of the presumption of atheism and are not refuted by the objections; the live question is whether religious experience and proper function legitimately expand the evidence base (SEP Epistemology of Religion §3, §6).

Fideism

Abstract

Blaise Pascal and the fideist tradition deny the evidentialist principle for the religious case: faith "is in some sense independent of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason" (SEP Fideism §1). Pascal's distinctive claim is not that faith is irrational but that it is "rational in a prudential rather than an epistemic sense": the object of belief, an "infinitely incomprehensible" being, is such as to render the usual apologetic proofs "necessarily inadequate" (SEP Fideism §2.2.1). Kierkegaard radicalizes this into the "qualitative leap," and Wittgensteinian readings relocate faith to its own "language-game." The heart, not the syllogism, is the organ of faith.

Formal statement

Reconstructed from Pascal directly, with the tradition's later development via the SEP:

1. Reason is neutral on God's existence: "God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 233).
2. Faith is not the conclusion of proof but a distinct mode of knowing: "It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 278).
3. Faith is nonetheless not contrary to reason; reason's own last act is to see its limits: "There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 272).
4. Under acknowledged ambiguity the rational course is to wager for God and to seek, since the stake is finite and the possible gain infinite (Pascal, Pensées fr. 233).

Key evidence / textual basis

Pascal grounds faith in the heart's own reasons: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 277). This is not anti-intellectualism; the same heart is the seat of "first principles"—"we know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart," and "reason must trust these intuitions of the heart" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 282). Faith is finally received, not achieved: "Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 279). Pascal even balances the two errors precisely: "If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 273).

The Wager then addresses the seeker whom reason has left stranded. Since "you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked," and since "if you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing," one should "wager, then, without hesitation that He is" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 233). To the objector who protests "I am so made that I cannot believe," Pascal prescribes action ahead of assent: "Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said... Even this will naturally make you believe" (Pascal, Pensées fr. 233). Kierkegaard supplies the existential form the SEP records: faith requires "a decision or 'qualitative leap'," and the believer "must continually see to it that he holds fast the objective uncertainty" (SEP Fideism §2.2.2).

Leading proponents

• Blaise Pascal — Pensées (1670): the heart's reasons, the hidden God, and the Wager. In corpus; quoted directly.
• Søren Kierkegaard — Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846): faith as "objective uncertainty held fast" in "passionate inwardness" (corpus gap: translations not in raw/; via SEP Fideism §2.2.2 and SEP Faith §7).
• The Wittgensteinian strand (D. Z. Phillips) — religion as an "autonomous" language-game with its own criteria of justification; note the SEP judges "Wittgensteinian Fideism" largely "a caricature" of both Wittgenstein and Phillips (SEP Fideism §2.2.4; SEP Epistemology of Religion §6).

Strongest counter-arguments

First, the impiety / gaming-table objection, from James: "when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps" (SEP Fideism §2.2.1). Second, the doxastic-voluntarism worry: belief "is not open to direct voluntary control," so one cannot simply choose it for prudential reasons (SEP Fideism §2.2.1). Third, the many-gods objection: the Wager's payoff structure "is not limited to Christianity and atheism alone, since one could formulate a Pascalian Wager for Islam" or other traditions (SEP Pragmatic Arguments §2). Fourth, against Kierkegaard, Mackie's charge that the leap is "a sort of intellectual Russian roulette"—a decision "made seemingly arbitrarily, in the absence of any rational assurance" (SEP Fideism §2.2.2).

Responses

To voluntarism, Pascal is committed only to indirect doxastic voluntarism: one "can indirectly control his or her beliefs by directly controlling his or her epistemic situation"—which is exactly the holy-water strategy (SEP Fideism §2.2.1). To the impiety charge, the Wager "is merely instrumental... a first step toward, and not a substitute for, genuine religious faith," and objecting that prudential grounds are improper "seems to presuppose precisely what Pascal denies—that there are epistemic reasons on which one's decision might more appropriately rest" (SEP Fideism §2.2.1). The many-gods objection is the hardest; Jeff Jordan's reconfigured wager concedes it and claims only "that atheism and agnosticism are irrational," not that one religion beats the others (SEP Fideism §2.2.1). To Mackie, Kierkegaard's defenders reply that faith "is incomprehensible... but it is not unreasonable or irrational"—the believer "uses the understanding so much that through it he becomes aware of the incomprehensible" (SEP Fideism §2.2.2).

Assessment

Assessment: Live — Pascal's insight that an incomprehensible God cannot be reached by proof alone, and his relocation of faith to the heart and the will, remain philosophically serious and are the least dependent on external evidence; but the many-gods objection to the Wager is unresolved, and the charge that fideism licenses arbitrary commitment is answered only by conceding, with Kierkegaard, that reason may still veto "nonsense" while assenting to the incomprehensible (SEP Fideism §2.2.1–2.2.2).

Reformed Epistemology / Thomist Synthesis

Abstract

This view refuses the dilemma of "argue or leap." Alvin Plantinga and the Reformed epistemologists deny the evidentialist's hidden premise that only inferential evidence justifies: theistic belief can be properly basic and warranted, grounded directly in religious experience or the sensus divinitatis, provided it is "grounded" and "defended against known objections" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). Thomas Aquinas takes a complementary route: reason and faith do not compete, because reason establishes the preambles of faith—among them God's existence—while grace supplies the assent. Where the fideist splits faith from reason, the Thomist nests them.

Formal statement

The two strands, stated in parallel.

Reformed (Plantinga): 1. A belief is warranted if it results from the proper functioning of a truth-aimed cognitive faculty in a congenial environment (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). 2. On Plantinga's Aquinas/Calvin model, God has designed a sensus divinitatis whose proper deliverance is basic belief in God; and if theism is true, that belief is warranted without argument. 3. Therefore theistic belief can be rational "without Enlightenment-approved evidence," and the evidentialist objection is undercut (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6).

Thomist (Aquinas): 4. Some truths about God "exceed human reason" and require revelation; others reason can reach (Aquinas, Summa I, Q.1 a.1). 5. God's existence "and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature" (Aquinas, Summa I, Q.2 a.2 ad 1). 6. Therefore reason and faith are complementary: reason lays the foundation, faith completes the edifice.

Key evidence / textual basis

Aquinas builds the synthesis textually. He begins from the necessity of revelation alongside philosophy: "it was necessary for man's salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason," since the human end "surpasses the grasp of his reason" (Aquinas, Summa I, Q.1 a.1). Yet reason is not thereby idle: pressing Paul's claim that "the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Rom 1:20 (bib)), Aquinas holds that "the existence of God... can be demonstrated from those of His effects which are known to us" (Aquinas, Summa I, Q.2 a.2). The keystone is his reply that such demonstrable truths are "preambles to the articles" of faith, not articles themselves—so that "there is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated" (Aquinas, Summa I, Q.2 a.2 ad 1). Reason and faith reach the same God by different roads. Notably, Aquinas frames the objection using Hebrews: "faith is of the unseen (Heb. 11:1)" (Heb 11:1 (bib)), then dissolves the tension by distinguishing preamble from article.

The Reformed strand supplies the modern epistemology. The SEP records that "reformed epistemologists assert that ordinary religious experiences of awe, gratitude, contrition, etc., ground the beliefs implied by the believer's sincere reports of such experiences," and such grounded beliefs are "warranted provided they can be defended against known objections" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). Plantinga's own Aquinas/Calvin model relies on original sin: "most humans suffer from a cognitive-affective disorder, but... as a result of Redemption the Holy Spirit heals us so that we are able to function properly" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §7). The SEP-Faith entry stresses that Plantinga "does respect an evidential requirement," holding it "may be fully met through what is basically, non-inferentially, evident in the believer's experience"—hence his insistence "that his Reformed epistemology is not fideistic" (SEP Faith §4).

Leading proponents

• Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologiae I, qq.1–2 (1265–1273): faith presupposes reason; God's existence a demonstrable preamble, not an article. In corpus; quoted directly.
• Alvin Plantinga — "Reason and Belief in God" (1983) and Warranted Christian Belief (2000): properly basic belief; warrant as proper function; the Aquinas/Calvin model (corpus gap: monographs not in raw/; via SEP Epistemology of Religion §6–7 and SEP Faith §3–4).
• Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston — the co-founders; Alston assimilating certain religious experience "to perception" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §7). Richard Swinburne represents the rival evidentialist-theist wing, meeting the demand with Bayesian natural theology rather than bypassing it (SEP Epistemology of Religion §4).

Strongest counter-arguments

First, the circularity of Plantinga's model: "the Aquinas/Calvin model supports the Christian metaphysics, which in turn supports the Aquinas/Calvin model," and the SEP shows the probability of Christian metaphysics is bounded unless the model's prior is near-certain (SEP Epistemology of Religion §7). Second, Gellman's symmetry problem: the "experience of godlessness," occasioned by surrounding evils, "would seem to ground atheism in the same way that the experience of forgiveness can ground theism" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). Third, debunking: Barrett's hypersensitive agency-detection device (HADD) "functions properly if the goal is survival but is hypersensitive if the goal is truth," undermining the proper basicality of religious belief (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). Fourth, against the Thomist, the question of entitlement the SEP-Faith entry presses: accepting truths on divine authority when the existence of such an authority is itself among those truths leads to circularity—Descartes's worry that "this argument cannot be put to unbelievers because they would judge it to be circular" (SEP Faith §5). Swinburne, from within theism, adds that Plantinga's later position "largely ignores the question of justification, or reasonableness" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6).

Responses

To debunking, the SEP records a stand-off that favors the theist dialectically: "if atheist naturalism is correct then theism would not be the result of proper functioning, but if God exist it is," so "the de-bunker has failed to undercut religious belief"—and Clark and Barrett suggest HADD's sensitivity "could itself be part of the divine plan" (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). To the entitlement/circularity charge against Aquinas, the Thomist replies that the preambles are precisely what reason secures independently, so the foundational belief that God exists need not rest on the very authority it grounds—"faith presupposes natural knowledge" (Aquinas, Summa I, Q.2 a.2 ad 1); this is the structural advantage of the Thomist over the pure fideist. To Swinburne's demand, a hybrid is available: the SEP sketches "a part evidentialist, part reformed, program of assessing the all-things-considered probability" that treats basic theistic belief as a prior to be updated on evidence (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6). The Gellman symmetry and the model's circularity remain, in our judgment, the least answered.

Assessment

Assessment: Strong — the combined Reformed/Thomist view is the dominant contemporary framework for the rationality of theistic belief, and it neutralizes strong evidentialism at parity while, in the Thomist form, retaining a genuine role for reasoned demonstration via the preambles; its unresolved burdens are the circularity of the Aquinas/Calvin model and Gellman's experiential symmetry, where the debate shifts to hybrid evidentialist-Reformed probability programs (SEP Epistemology of Religion §6–7).